Stringing together words about web performance and standards.
“If you give the same advice more than twice, write a blog post!” - Abraham Lincoln Over the years, I’ve helped a few folks get into browser development, and tried to encourage many others. In that process, I found myself giving similar advice, again and again. This is my attempt to have somewhere I can send browser-curious folks to. So, in this post, I’ll try to outline why you may want to…
Being a multilingual user on the web can sometimes be a frustrating experience. Depending on the device you’re using and the language it happens to be configured to, some websites will try to accommodate you, and give you a translated version of their content, even though you may prefer the non-translated original. That is why a recent Intent to experiment around language negotiation caught my…
I was recently asked if I knew how Chromium’s cookies were evicted/garbage-collected. My answer was that I don’t know, but I can find out. This post is what I discovered while digging through the code. Hopefully it will be useful to someone else (or at the very least, to future me). There's not a lot of prose in this one, mostly code pointers and references.. TL;DR - If you want some of your…
# Not a bundle of joy? Folks in the web development community have recently started talking about trying to get rid of bundling as part of the deployment process. It’s almost as if people don’t like to add extra layers of complexity to their build processes. At least some developers seem to want to just Use The Platform™ and ship ES modules to the browser, the same way they write them. And those…
This is a non-technical post. If you're just here for the tech, feel free to skip this one. When I was 13 years old, a friend invited me to join them ice skating. There was an ice skating rink that recently opened and was all the rage. I never really went ice skating before, but thought to myself: "how bad can it be?" Pretty bad, turns out. While others around me for which it was the first time…
I wrote a Google-internal version of this post on the train back from W3C TPAC in Seville, but thought this could be useful to the broader Chromium community. At the same time, this is my own personal opinion . I speak for no one other than myself. Here goes! TPAC was an amazing week, full of great folks from a large variety of companies, all working together to build the open web. But at least a…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about task attribution semantics and learning a ton about that subject, so I thought I’d document the ways in which I’ve come to think about it. This may not be a subject everyone would find fascinating, so it’s mostly aimed at other like-minded folks who’ve been thinking about this space a lot, or that one person that thought about this a lot and then got…
Has this ever happened to you ? You wake up one morning, scrolling the feeds while sipping your coffee, when all of the sudden you land on a post related to a web platform proposal that you really don't like. Worse, one that you believe would have significant negative consequences on the web if shipped? At that point, you may feel that your insights and experience can be valuable to help steer the…
Last month the Web Performance WG had a face to face meeting (or F2F, for short), and I wanted to write down something about it ever since. Now I’m stuck on an airplane, so here goes! :) The F2F was extremely fun and productive. While most of the usual suspects group’s regular attendees were there, we also had a lot of industry folks that recently joined, which made the event extremely valuable.…
One of the biggest advantages of working on the web has always been the people. Ever since I started contributing to the web platform, back in 2013, working with browser engineers was always a great experience. An amazing collection of super smart, thoughtful and kind folks. That’s what kept me invested in the Chromium project throughout the years since then as an external contributor. First when…
This is a republication of my Perf Calendar post , because I really like it and wanted it to be on my blog. Own your content and all that... There's a lot of talk these days about browser caches in relation to preload , HTTP/2 push and Service workers , but also a lot of confusion. So, I'd like to tell you a story about one request's journey to fulfill its destiny and find a matching resource. The…
A couple of weeks ago I attended TPAC , the annual week-long W3C festivities meeting, and I'd like to share my notes and impressions from a few of the sessions we ran. # Responsive Images While most days at TPAC are split into Working-Group-specific meetings, Wednesday is traditionally filled with breakout sessions that aren't necessarily affiliated with any WG in particular. As part of that, we…
I've spent a few days last week in Stockholm attending the HTTP Workshop , and taken part in many fascinating discussions. One of them revolved around HTTP push, its advantages, disadvantages and the results we see from early experiments on that front. The general attitude towards push was skeptical, due to the not-so-great results presented from early deployments, so I'd like to share my…
There have been a lot of talk recently about the Network Info API . Paul Kinlan published an article about using Service Worker along with the Network Info API to send network information up to the server and let the server adapt its responses to these network info bits. There is also an intent to implement the downlinkMax attribute in the Blink rendering engine. Since I have Opinions™ on the…
The Web platform is a wonderful thing. Its reach is unparalleled in human history. It enables people all over the world to access vital information, education and entertainment. People old and young, rich and poor. It makes their lives better than they would have been without it. It also enables commerce, banking, and improved supply chains. The world's economy would have been very different…
Mozilla have recently announced that they are planning to deprecate insecure-HTTP, which includes denying new features from sites that are served over HTTP connections. I believe that is a mistake. I tweeted about it, but a longer form is in order, so here goes. # Why HTTPS everywhere is important Let me start by saying that I strongly believe that the Web should move to HTTPS, and serving content…
I owe you fine folks a blog post. I recently tidied up my blog and moved it to a new backend and in the process realized that I haven't blogged in over 18 months. (!!!) # Where did I disappear? A lot have happened during that time: The markup based responsive images solutions, which seemed to be facing a dead-end in September 2013, were revived and significantly improved. In order to defuse…
It's been a year since I last wrote about it , but the dream of the "magical image format" that will solve world hunger and/or the responsive images problem (whichever one comes first) lives on. A few weeks back I started wondering if such an image format can be used to solve both the art-direction and resolution-switching use-cases. I had a few ideas on how this can be done, so I created a…
# For the impatient Sizer-Soze is a utility that enables you to evaluate how much you could save by properly resizing your images to match their display size on various viewports. Basically it shows you how much image data you could save if you deployed an ideal responsive images solution. If you already have a responsive images solution in place, it enables you to see how far it is from that…
For a while now, the art-direction use-case have been treated by browser vendors as resolution-switching 's imaginary friend. When talking to people who work for browser vendors about that use-case, I've heard phrases like "that's a really obscure use-case" and "No one is really doing art-direction". This got me wondering — how big is that use-case? How many Web developers & designers are willing…
I just read Jason Grigsby 's post , and tried to answer it in the comments, but saw that my response passed the limits of a reasonable comment. So here I am. This post is a proposal for a file structure that will enable browsers to fetch images encoded using a responsive image format. # But which format? Regardless of the image format that will eventually be used, a large part of the problem is…
# Summary for the impatient Lossless compression with current formats can reduce image size on the web by 12.5%. PNG24 with an Alpha channel comprise 14% of images on the web. We can cut their size by 80% using WebP. Savings from lossless optimization can save 1.5% of overall Internet traffic !* Savings from conversion of PNG24 with an alpha channel to WebP can save 2.1% of overall Internet…
Can't be done? All along the responsive images debate, there were several people that claimed that the salvation will come in the form of a new image format that will enable images that are automagically responsive. My response to these claims was always that it can't be done. It can't be done since the browser needs to download the image in order for it to analyze which parts of the image it…
TL;DR Spoiler: If you have inline scripts that must be inside your page, adding an empty <div> before all stylesheet links will avoid a CSS bottleneck!!! Do we really need Async CSS? I've stumbled upon a post by Guy Podjarny called Eliminating the CSS bottleneck which talks about using async stylesheets in order to avoid external stylesheets from blocking the download of other resources. What…
Responsive Images and cookies Jason Grigsby wrote a great post summarizing different approaches to responsive images and what sucks about them. Among other things, he discussed the problem of getting the first page load right. After a short discussion with him on Twitter, I decided to take a deeper look into the Filament group's cookie based method . Tests Testing their demo site using Firefox…
TL;DR Adding a media attribute that supports queries to the base tag is all that's required to have responsive images with no performance penalty. The thread After my last post Nicolas Gallagher pointed me towards a mail thread on html-public mailing list that discusses appropriate solutions to the responsive images problem. * There were a few suggested solutions there: Each image tag will have…
TL;DR Responsive images are important for mobile performance. Hacks may solve the problem, but they come with their own performance penalty. Browser vendors must step up to create a standard, supported method. What we have There have been several techniques published lately that enable responsive images using various hacks: Harry Roberts suggested to use background images & media queries to…
Proposal flood In the last few days there have been a lot of proposals regarding ways to load lower resolution images for lower resolution devices. There have been Nicolas Gallagher's Responsive images using CSS3 , a proposal on the W3C list, and yesterday came Robert Nyman's proposal . Obviously, I also have an opinion on the matter :) My contribution to the flood While the proposals from Nicolas…
I had a twitter discussion today with Robert Nyman regarding how we should treat old IEs (6,7 and 8) when we develop. The trigger was his tweet regarding his post from 2 years back that we should stop developing for IE6. Since twitter is fairly limited for this kind of things, here's my real, chatty opinion on this subject. Stats below are taken from statcounter and regard EU and North America.…
There's been a lot of noise recently in the web dev world regarding UA sniffing vs. feature detection. It all started when Alex Russell wrote out a post suggesting that there are cases where feature detection UA sniffing can be used, and where feature detection wastes precious time asking questions we already know the answer to. As he predicted, that stirred up a lot of controversy. Nicolas Zakas…
So, I've decided to try this blogging thing all the cool kids been talking about. The last straw was PPK's reason for shutting down comments on his blog : "The opinions and musings of the average blog commenter are just not very interesting. If they were, they’d have a blog of their own." I have interesting opinions and musings. I do! Therefore, I must have a blog. So I built this thing. Or more…